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Beginning in the mid-19th century, the second military revolution industrialized warfare and cemented its institutional bond with the nation-state, thus penetrating even further into society. The rapid development of science, technology, and industry radically transformed the conditions of warfare. The invention and mass production of steamships, telegraphs, canned food, railways, and automatic weapons made armies well fed, well equipped, well organized, and highly mobile. The nation-state emerged as a powerful territorially compact machine, reinforced by technological and industrial developments and capable of sustaining massive conscript armies. World Wars I and II were the epitome of industrialized total wars where the resources of the nation-state, including all healthy men and women, transport, trade, industrial production, and communications, were at the disposal of the nation-state at war. The war became a conflict not just between two armies but between entire populations. Mass production, mass politics, and mass communications mobilized for mass destruction, as total war eliminated the distinction between state and society, military and civilian, and public and private spheres. Nevertheless, not only did the nation-state and mass armies appear together but also mass participation in total wars had a direct impact on the development of citizenship rights. It is no accident that a more inclusive society, together with the extension of suffrage and the development of the welfare state, emerged after two total wars, with military obligations intrinsically linked to citizenship rights.

Although nuclear weapons and the Soviet and American hegemonic geopolitical balance made war more or less safely cold for most of the latter half of 20th century, the collapse of communism triggered structural instability, creating conditions for the new forms of warfare. These new wars, linked to the processes of globalization, are two dominant types: predatory warfare and risk transfer war. Predatory war emerges in the context of failing post-cold war nation-states where new political elites rely on identity politics to mobilize ethnic and religious sentiments among the population. Employing paramilitaries and remnants of the collapsing state structure, these nation-states politicize cultural difference and wage genocidal wars on civilians while at the same time acquiring personal wealth and maintaining a hold on power. Wars based on the transfer of risk are waged by the most technologically advanced countries such as the United States and the United Kingdom. Their focus is on minimizing life risks to Western military personnel and consequently on minimizing electoral and political risks to the state leadership by transferring these risks directly to the weaker enemy. From the Falkland war of 1982, to the Gulf, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq wars, the reliance on technologically sophisticated weapons helps create the systematic transfer of risks from elected politicians to the military personnel and from them to the enemy combatants and their civilians.

When the choice is between (foreign) civilian lives and the lives of Western soldiers, soldiers always have priority. These two forms of warfare are deeply interlinked by the forces of globalization as they erupt in the empty space that separates the coordinated machinery of global markets from the incoherent and disconnected forms of localized politics.

References:

1) Giddens, Anthony. 1985. The Nation-State and Violence. Cambridge, England: Polity Press.

2) Hirst, Paul. 2001. War and Power in the 21st Century. Cambridge, England: Polity Press.

3) Mann, Michael. 1993. The Sources of Social Power. Vol. 2. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

4) Shaw, Martin. 2005. The New Western Way of War. Cambridge, England: Polity Press.

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